Foreword

I

The essays in this book were written, as all methodological essays should be written, in the closest intimacy with actual research and against a background of constant and intensive meditation on the substantive problems of the theory and strategy of the social sciences. They were written in the years between 1903 and 1917, the most productive years of Max Weber's life, when he was working on his studies in the sociology of religion and on the second and third parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Even before the earliest of the three published here—"‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy" ¹ in 1904. —was written, Weber had achieved eminence in Germany in a variety of fields. He had already done important work in economic and legal history and had taught economic theory as the incumbent of one of the most famous chairs in Germany; on the basis of original investigations, he had acquired a specialist's knowledge of the details of German economic and social structure. His always vital concern for the political prosperity of Germany among the nations had thrust him deeply into the discussion of political ideals and programmes. Thus he did not come to the methodology of the social sciences as an outsider who seeks to impose standards on practices and problems of which he is ignorant. The interest which his methodology holds for us to-day is to a great extent a result of this feature of Weber's career just as some of its shortcomings from our present point of view may perhaps be attributed to the fact that some of the methodological problems which he treated could not be satisfactorily resolved prior to certain actual developments in research technique.

The essay on "Objectivity" had its immediate origins in his desire to clarify the implications of a very concrete problem. Weber, togetherwith Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé, was assuming the editorship of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik which was, from his assumption of editorial responsibility in 1904 until its suspension in 1933, probably the greatest periodical publication in the field of the social sciences in any language. He wished to make explicit the standards which the editors would apply and to which they would expect their contributors to conform. In doing so, his powerful mind, which strove restlessly for clarity at levels where his contemporaries were satisfied with ambiguities and clichés, drove through to the fundamental problems of the relationship between general sociological concepts and propositions on the one hand, and concrete historical reality on the other. Another problem which was to engage him until his death—the problem of the relationship between evaluative standpoints or non normative judgments and empirical knowledge—received its first full statement in this essay.

"Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences" was published in the Archiv in 1905. It must have been in the process of production while he was also busy with a large scale investigation of certain aspect; of German rural society and with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The intricate task of explaining causally the emergence of an "historical individual" (in this instance, modern capitalism) finds its methodological reflection in this essay which treats of the nature of explanation of particular historical events in its relationship to general or universal propositions. At the same time, he continued, on this occasion much more specifically and with many illustrations, to examine, as he had in the essay on "Objectivity", the role of evaluative points of view in the selection of subject matters and problems and in the constructive application of categories. His efforts in this essay were partly a continuation of his long-standing, self-clarifying polemic against "objectivism" and "historicism" but its analysis drew its vividness and its realistic tone from the fact that he was continuously attempting to explain to himself the procedures which he (and other important historians and social scientists) were actually using in the choice of problems and in the search for solutions to them.

"The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics" was publisher in Logos in 1917, in the midst of the first World War. It was a time when patriotic professors were invoking the authority of their academic disciplines for the legitimation of their political arguments, when Weber himself was engaged in a series of titanic polemics against the prevailing political system and while he was still working on the sociology of religion. (Perhaps he had already begun by this time to work on the more rigorously systematic First Part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.² The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (London 1947). ) The essay itself was a revision of a memorandum, written about four years earlier to serve as the basis of a private discussion in the Verein fur Sozialpolitik and never made publicly accessible. A mass of particular, concrete interests underlie this essay—his recurrent effort to penerate to the postulates of economic theory,³ his ethical passion for academic freedom, his fervent nationalist political convictions and his own perpetual demand for intellectual integrity. Max Weber's pressing need to know the grounds for his own actions and his strong belief that man's dignity consists in his capacity for rational self-determination are evident throughout this essay—as well as his contempt for those whose confidence in the rightness of their moral judgment is so weak that they feel the urge to support it by some authority such as the "trend of history" or its conformity with scientific doctrine in a sphere in which the powers of science are definitely limited. On this occasion too, Weber worked his way through to the most fundamental and most widely ramified methodological problems in the attempt to reach clarity about the bases of his own practical judgment. Here, of course, he was not dealing primarily with the methodology of research, but his procedure and his success illustrate the fruitfulness of methodological analysis when it has actual judgments and observations to analyze rather than merely a body of rules from which it makes deductions.

The three essays published here do not comprise all of Weber's methodological writings—in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre they constitute only one third of a volume of nearly six-hundred pages. One of the most important of his methodological essays—"Roscher und Knies und die logischen Problems der historischen National ökonomie" has not been included in the present collection, while another important section of the German edition-"Methodische Grundlagen der Soziologie"—has already been published in English. ⁴Yet except for the analysis of the procedure involved in the verstehende explanation of behaviour which is contained in the latter essay and in an earlier and less elaborate version, in the essay "Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie," ⁵Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenscaaftslehre. the main propositions of Weber's methodology are fully contained here.

II.

In many any respects, social science to-day is unrecognizably different from what it was in the years when these essays were written. Particularly in he United States and Great Britain, the social sciences have developed a whole series of techniques of observation and analysis and have on the basis of these, proceeded to describe the contemporary world with a degree of concreteness and accuracy which only a few optimist could have expected in Weber's time. The number of social scientists engaged in research has increased by a large multiple and the resources available for financing research have likewise multiplied many times over. The success of the social sciences in devising procedures of convincing reliability have led to their marriage with policy to an extent which could have been conceived only in principle in Weber's time.

The turn of events and the passage of years have not however reduced the relevance of these essays. The concrete incidents have changed—we are no longer concerned to refute the errors of "objectivism" and "professorial prophets" are not a very important problem for us—but the relationship between concrete research, whether it be descriptive concrete research or explanatory concrete research, and general theory has become a problem more pressing than ever, even though awareness of it is much less than universal. Many of our current advances in research are made in ways which seem to avoid raising the problem—so many of our successes are successes in accurate description in investigations in which the problem of explanation is left to those who requested the investigation or who are to "use" the results. Sometimes our desire for accurate description is so great that we feel that our intellectual needs are exhausted when that end has been achieved. Moreover much of the acceptance and appreciation of the utility of social science in the circles with the power to finance it and use it, extends largely to just those aspects of social science research which are almost exclusively descriptive or in which the task of explanation is disposed of by correlations of indices of ambiguous analytical meaning or by ad hoc common sense interpretations. The fact that the correlations among the indices of ambiguous analytical meaning is often high and that the possibilities of successful practical manipulation are thus enhanced constitutes a barrier to our perception of the need for theory. Here, these essays of Max Weber can perform a very useful service. The substantive theory itself will not be found here—that must be sought in part in the other writings of Max Weber, in part it must be sought in other writers, and in largest part it is still to be created—but the rigorous and convincing demonstration of the indispensability of theory in any explanation of concrete phenomena will be found here. Although the content of the theory will have to be sought elsewhere, Weber's methodological writings also raise important questions regarding the structure of a theoretical system, and the possibilities of a variety of theoretical systems constructed around their central problems and ultimately "related to values".

In the period of his life when he wrote "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy," Weber still, under Rickert's influence, regarded the particular and the concrete as the really "value-relevant" phenomenon which the social scientist must understand and seek to explain in the appropriate manner. For him, at this stage, a system of general concepts and a general theory was simply an instrument. It is really irrelevant as to whether we agree with Weber that it is the "value relevance" of concrete events which distinguishes the social from the natural sciences—the important point was that he saw the possibility and significance of a general theory. It is most unfortunate that when he began to elaborate the general conceptual system which was to form the first four chapters of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft, and which must have been intended by him as part of a general theory which would have explanatory value, he did not write a methodological essay on the problems of theory-construction and systematization in the social sciences. "‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy" brings the problem before us in a most intriguing way but leaves it unsolved. In doing so however, it raises issues which contemporary social scientists must face if our knowledge is to rise into a systematic scientific theory and not merely pile up in a chaos of unrelated monographs and articles.

The impressive improvement of social science over the three decades since Weber's death has been accompanied by a vast sprawl of interest over a multitude of subject matters which cannot readily be coordinated intellectually into a unified body of knowledge. In some measure this has been the outcome of random curiosity, in some instances it has been the result of immediate practical problems. But it is now appropriate to begin to pay more attention to the criteria by which problems are to be selected. A healthy science, developing in a balanced way, would not normally have to concern itself with this mat er. But it does seem that in the present state of social science in which theory and observation have tended to run apart from one another, and in which there has been a scatter of attention over a large number of unconnected particular problems, some serious consideration of the criteria of problem-selection would be fruitful. Here Weber's discussion of "value-relevance" can help to bring order into the social sciences. His discussion can heighten our self-consciousness regarding the grounds on which we choose problems for investigation. More self-consciousness about this process and more discussion about it might also increase the amount of consensus about the substantive as well as the formal criteria of problem-selection. And if this is coupled with an intensified awareness of the theoretical necessities entailed in concrete empirical investigation, the chances for a growth of knowledge about certain crucial problems would appear, in the light of our constantly improving technical resources, to be very good.

Weber's appositeness to the present situation of social science emerges again when we turn to still another problem. In Weber's own life-time social scientists were scarcely ever found in the employment of governments. "The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics" was directed towards the social scientists in universities who made assertions about the right ends of policy in the name of their scientific or scholarly disciplines; it was intended to clarify the ways and the extent to which statements about policy could be based on scientific knowledge. The situation has changed greatly since then. In both the United States and Great Britain very large numbers of social scientists are employed in Governmental service, and outside the Government social scientists are becoming increasingly concerned with "applied social research". In most instances the ends of policy are taken for granted, the social scientists working to provide data about the present situation from which the policy is to take its departure, or to provide estimates of the consequences of alternative policies. In a smaller proportion of cases, social scientists believe that the right ends of policy can be determined by social science research. (This "scientistic" attitude seems to have become more pronounced with the scientifically right and necessary ascent to pre-eminence of the theory of personality, but it is by no means limited to social scientists trained in psychology.) Weber's treatment of the relationship between social science and the ends of action and therewith of policy should aid social scientists to see both their possibilities and their limitations. It should dissolve the false identification of an apolitical attitude with scientific integrity, and it should help to refute the baseless accusation that the social sciences are ethically relativistic or nihilistic either in their logical implications or in their empirical consequences. If it helps social scientists to think better about the way in which social science can clarify the assumptions of policy, it will also help them in the clarification of the criteria of value-relevance. By tracing the assumptions of any policy back to its postulates, the establishment of the "value-relevance" of a subject matter or problem will also be carried out on a more general or theoretical plane. Problems for research will therefore themselves tend to be formulated with closer regard for their theoretical assumptions; and the movement of research interest on to a more abstract plane, where theory and research will be fused, will become more likely.

But these are only a few of the many lines which connect Max Weber's methodological analysis to the main issues of contemporary social science. 6 The most accurate and elaborate studies of Max Weber's methodology are Alexander von Schelting: Max Weber's Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen 1934) and Talcott Parsons: The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Illinois, 1949) (Chapter XVI). Useful analyses of some of Max Weber's methodological problems will be found in F. A. Hayek. "Scientism and the Study of Society": Economica: N.S.I. (1942) II. (1943), III (1944) and Karl Popper: "The Poverty of Historicism": Economica I & II (1944), III (1945).

Edward A. Shils

London, April 1949

Notes